A nation is group of people united behind a common purpose.  Everyone who cares about what you are doing – your fans, followers, constituents, members, donors, volunteers, customers, shareholders, and partners – are all part of your nation.  Think Colbert Nation, Fox Nation, even Bieber Nation.

NationBuilder is a Community Organizing System (COS), combining both a website and a CRM into one integrated service. It's especially useful for political campaigns and non-profits who used to have to pay thousands of dollars for outdated tools and the techies required to keep it all working. It's also useful for anyone organizing a community – online or offline – from PTAs to sports fan sites.

The Internet has seen incredible growth over the last several years in two types of applications – content management systems (CMS), such as WordPress, and social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and many, many more. If you want to build a nation, you need the ability keep track of and lead people on the Internet.

NationBuilder includes a flexible CMS for you to build your own websites, and also an interactive database for managing your social media, action campaigns, face-to-face contacts, email, texting and more. This second area is commonly known as a customer relationship system, or CRM. Groups like political campaigns, advocacy non-profits, mayor’s offices, and bloggers looking to take their community to the next level have traditionally had to pay thousands of dollars to build custom systems to bring together the web content and people parts of their organizations, and even then, social media is often an afterthought.

NationBuilder is a new platform that brings together your website and your supporters, donors and volunteers in the first community organizing system (COS). We’ve got an extensive tool suite designed for Internet organizing, all fully integrated with your websites. It’s easy to set up world-class campaigns and communities, with social media sharing built into every step. We take care of the tech so you can take care of growing your community.

In addition to our FAQ and screencasts pages, we'll be happy to offer you customer support at no additional charge. We also provide regular training opportunities, including free live events.

Once you sign up for a NationBuilder account you'll have our support email, where you'll be able to reach us any time. If need be, we'll be happy to set up a call in order to walk you through whatever issue you might be having.

Yes, NationBuilder is available to people outside of the U.S. 

Right now we don't offer voicemail or text messaging to customers outside the U.S. and Canada, but our goal is to increase the number of countries where that is available over time.

NationBuilder is currently only available in English.

Our initial focus has been on activists, political campaigns, non-profits and advocacy groups, but we hope all kinds of independent leaders and creators like authors, filmmakers, musicians, artists, journalists, small businesses and churches will find NationBuilder useful.

We are also completely non-partisan. We only state this because most tools used in the political world are only available to one side or the other, which we think is wrong. The tools of democracy should be available to everyone, and we are deeply committed to that.

Yes. NationBuilder allows you to set up a donation page and start collecting donations quickly. Donation pages are simple and secure, and all of your new donors will become supporters in your database so that you can keep track of them. The finances tab in the control panel makes it easy to view, sort, and organize all of your financial data and donation drives.

We built NationBuilder so users with very limited technical knowledge can be quickly up and running. You do not need to know any HTML or CSS to setup your web site or create new pages. All the best practices for activities such as fundraising, petitions, surveys and so on are built-in, so you take advantage of them automatically.  Facebook and Twitter are also automatically integrated, so you don't even need to figure out widgets. However, if you have HTML and CSS knowledge, you will be able to create custom themes and change everything down to the last detail.

NationBuilder has several levels of administrative access to help you manage your nation and keep it secure. Only people you grant access to the control panel can view and update your database, and we do not share your data with anyone. A small number of NationBuilder employees have access to your database to assist with customer support requests.

Each of our employees signs a strict confidentiality policy that covers employee access to your data. You can read our confidentiality policy here. Additionally, we have a policy in place to regarding conflicts and employee ethics.

You can use the NationBuilder theme editor to transfer over your HTML and CSS to match the look and feel of your NationBuilder website with your existing site. However, NationBuilder has many different types of "pages" where features and best practices of specific activities (such as petitions or donating) are built in. Recreating these pages is quick and easy and they will inherit the design you configured in the theme editor. You also have full access to the HTML and CSS of every page.

If you don't have the time or ability to do this, we can refer you to consultants experienced in customizing NationBuilder for you. Just drop us an email.

NationBuilder does not currently integrate with other CMS (content management system) platforms like WordPress or Drupal. This type of integration is coming soon, but NationBuilder is designed to actually replace those tools for a lot of people, and be a huge upgrade.

Big usability problems frequently arise in the interaction between activism tools, CMS tools, and social networking sites like Facebook, so creating a platform that was fully integrated was our first mission. This is part of what creates such a great user experience for you and your users.

But soon you will be able to take just the elements of NationBuilder you like and mix and match them with whatever other tools you may want to use.

If you want to use our action pages in concert with an existing site, here's some info on using redirects and action chains to integrate NationBuilder and another CMS.

And if you want to migrate an existing site to NationBuilder's CMS, check out our legacy URL importer.

After your free 14-day trial period, you will be billed on a monthly basis.

NationBuilder pricing plans a determined by the amount of people in your database. You will be charged additionally for email blasting and text messaging, these too are monthly charges based on the ammount of people on your email list and text list respectively. 

Anyone designated as as the administrator for a NationBuilder account will receive copies of the billing invoices. If you want someone to have full access to everything but the account billing, they should be designated as a "staffer."

We presently have a webhooks API, which can push data to a URL when a signup, donation, or contact is created. There is no REST API yet for pushing data in or querying it, although we absolutely plan to have one in the future.

Yes, NationBuilder is a new service. If you are concerned about that, or have to convince the "powers that be" at your organization that we are legit, here is what you can tell them.

We are an incredibly experienced and committed team, who have built several companies and non-profits from the ground up.  Our parent company, 3dna, was founded in 2008 and includes other products such as the popular Twitter petition site act.ly. The engineers and organizers behind NationBuilder have deep and rich experience in software development, tech company management, journalism, film production, government and cause organizing. You can read more about us here.

NationBuilder is also well-funded, and early investors include Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. We are committed to growing our essential organizing toolkit long into the future, and are developing a large network of designers, developers and consultants who share our vision.

Since we have a lot of political customers that cross the ideological spectrum, sometimes we get asked this.  In a nutshell, NationBuilder is like Drupal or WordPress in that it is a platform available to everyone. NationBuilder is different as it is used to organize people, not content, but we don't discriminate at all based on what you are organizing them to do.

Specifically, here is our policy on political activity:

As a company:

• We do not take sides in political campaigns.
• Regardless of ideology, we strive to make every NationBuilder customer successful with the platform. We are kind of fanatical about this, and can provide references from dozens of parties in several countries.
• We are happy to provide advice on NationBuilder and digital strategy in general to any campaign that asks, whether they are NationBuilder customers or not. 
• We do not accept consulting fees for strategy from any political organizations, we only charge our subscription prices for the platform and occasional custom design and training services.

As individual staff:

• We all generally vote and are politically active. Any views expressed on Twitter or elsewhere online are as individuals. We do not hide our individual political views, preferring transparency, and we don’t all agree of course either.
• Individually, we do not accept consulting fees or serve in any official capacity for any political organizations, except for Adriel Hampton's role as the president and co-founder of SF Tech Dems, since he started it before joining NationBuilder.
• Individually, we do not make contributions to campaigns or PACs in excess of $250 per election cycle.